Sunday, July 24, 2016

Keighley News reports that the upcoming stage presentation of Wuthering Heights at the Haworth Church has been postponed (July 30):

The Friends of the Brontës Church planned to host Jorvik Theatre’s production on Saturday, July 30 at Haworth Parish Church.
But the group have now issued a statement saying that with “deep regret” they had to delay the presentation.
They added: “This is due to the over-running of building works within the church. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.”
The play, intended to celebrate the church’s reopening, was due to feature local actor Geraldine (Gerry) Hill in the major role of the Narrator. (David Knights)

Last film you saw?
The 1939 version of Wuthering Heights with Laurence Olivier and David Niven. It does me in every time. (Jon Wilde)

Paul Kingsnorth in The Guardian thinks that writers should reconnect with the natural world:

There have always been novels in which the landscape, and the non-human creatures in it, have played a powerful part. Just looking along my bookshelf I can see Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and The Return of the Native, in which the rural landscapes of his still pre-modern Wessex are as memorable as his human characters; Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, whose wild Pennine uplands experience moods as dark as that of Heathcliff; Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy, set in a fictional archipelago whose islands are as distinctive as any on our planet; and DH Lawrence’s The Plumed Serpent, set in a dark pagan Mexico that lingers in the mind longer than its storyline.

Even Jane Eyre, a poor orphan, was well educated, spoke French and played the piano, ultimately and conveniently becoming a rich heiress. Who would I have been had I lived at Thornfield Hall with Mr Rochester? The housekeeper? More likely I would have been Leah, the maid of whom we are given few details and no sense of her life and passions, or whether Charlotte Brontë considered her, like Jane, a "free human being with an independent will".

While squinting through the keyhole, I watched Hannah prepare for her trip. “Ah,” said I. “Shades of Jane Eyre. Here’s a young maid leaving home to work for a wealthy man.”
Of course, after I hove open the doors and went inside I realized I was wrong — again. Well, mostly wrong.
Jane left home and got in tack with wealthy Mr. Rochester who had skeletons in his closets, so to speak — a crazy ol’ wife barred up in the attic or some such, if my faulty noggin serves me well.In the case of Ms. Johnson’s novel, Hannah doesn’t fall under the spell of a rich man with skeletons already in his closet — or under the stair, as the case may be. (Harold N. Walters)

Dolamore said the ideas for “Magic Under Glass” and “Magic Under Stone,” were based on her interest in the Victorian era. She also was inspired by one of her favorite authors, Charlotte Brontë, by writing a story that was Gothic and romantic. And she had interests in automatons, which are mechanical devices that were made to mimic humans. (Crystal Schell)

ABC Radio's (Australia) All in the Mind traces a cultural history of madness. Bertha Mason is quoted of course:

And in Australia where you were, the asylum is imported as one of the symbols of civilised existence, that we don't neglect the mentally ill and lock them up in a garret like Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre, and we don't stuff them in the jail and just neglect them, we now have this specialised institution. But those specialised institutions turn out not to work terribly well. (Andrew Scull)